The unions weren't buying Brown

[TrueBlueTerrier]

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Francis Beckett: The Labour leader's charm offensive did not wash at the TUC conference – they want a party they can trust
Saturday, 19 September 2009

The trade unions talked openly at the TUC conference this week of something that has long been whispered behind closed doors. Isn't it time they took their support away from the Labour party? Why not found a new political party for the new century, just as they founded Labour at the start of the last one?

It's easy to see why they have had enough of Labour. It's a couple of years since Tony Blair, who loathed the unions, told the TUC that he was addressing it for the last time, "probably to the relief of both of us", and the annual jamboree has hardly had a sniff of a minister since then, but the corridors of Liverpool last week were stiff with them. Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband and Yvette Cooper went on a serious charm offensive, and Brown in particular knows how to charm trade unionists. The message was: you, the brothers, are my real friends. I have come home.

No one really believed it, even the New Labour loyalists, and why should they? Unions still provide the money and the foot soldiers for New Labour at election time, but bankers and spivs have more access to Labour ministers than they have. When it comes to a choice between listening to the haves or have-nots, New Labour unerringly chooses the former. The public sector, where most union members work, is increasingly despised and derided: the view of the government seems to be that there is nothing the public sector can do that the private sector can't do better. New Labour not only led us into economic trouble, but is helping to ensure that it is the poor and not the rich who suffer most from it.

The unions waited 18 long years, from 1979 to 1997, for a government they could do business with. They poured their energies and their treasure into creating it, and it turned on them and thumbed its nose at them.

So why not set up their own party, as the communication workers' leader Billy Hayes suggested yesterday? It won't do, and you only had to walk the corridors of the Liverpool conference centre this past week, as I did, to know the answer. When the unions formed the Labour Representation Committee in 1900, their ambitions were limited to getting the voice of the worker into parliament; to get a bit of fairness, to help their members out of grinding poverty, to stop their members being exploited.

But in the 1960s and 70s, when people thought the unions were powerful, they became the playground for every faction on the left and centre left. Labour rightwingers, Tribunites, communists, Trotskyists, and everything in between – they all fought their dreary faction fights inside the unions, and they unwittingly helped destroy them.

They are still there – older, greyer, but still ready to scrutinise your politics for any sign of deviancy, still setting up litmus tests for ideological purity. At Liverpool last week, a middle-aged man tried to present Ed Miliband with a petition to sign, and Miliband, reasonably enough, refused because he hadn't read it. The man ran about the corridor shouting: "Did you see that? Miliband won't sign to kick the BNP out!" I met the head of communications for the Unite union, a man who, in the Morning Star, wrote that Stalin may have been guilty of "harsh measures" but wasn't it odd how the capitalist press ganged up on him? These are the elements you'd have to take along with you. You can imagine the debates you'd have.

But just because the unions are not, right now, up to starting another party, does not mean they have to support the one they have. If I were the leader of a trade union affiliated to the Labour party, I'd suggest disaffiliating right now – and then using my political fund and my electoral foot soldiers to support any individual candidate, of any party, whose record showed that he or she would support the underdog, and who believed in trade unionism.

[antcpfc]

I seem to remember during the 2007 strikes that Brown was asked a question about what should be done.He replied that there was no justification for the walkouts and we should get back to work.
Trouble is the tories are even worse ,although at least they dont pretend to be with us.

[flaminmoses]

i think the only option is a new party.